


Holy Darkness

by slightlykylie



Category: Till We Have Faces - C. S. Lewis
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 19:02:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/601078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slightlykylie/pseuds/slightlykylie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Until Orual came, Psyche hadn’t quite realized how strange she had begun to feel in her palace, with its invisible servants and alien finery and husband who came to her only in the dark.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Holy Darkness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [metonomia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/metonomia/gifts).



The wind was cold on the riverbank where Psyche sat huddled in the darkening evening, feeling mud seeping into her robes.  The palace, warm and dry with servants at her command, was a scant ten minutes’ walk from where she sat, but the idea of returning there right now gave Psyche a faint touch of nausea.  Across the bank somewhere, perhaps even closer  to Psyche than the palace was, Orual lay hidden, surely as cold and uncomfortable as Psyche herself.  Psyche shivered, pulling her robes tighter about her. Orual had been horrible – horrible – horrible; and yet there was a human connection between them all the same, in these mortal bodies that shivered in cold and shifted uncomfortably in mud.

 

Psyche hadn’t quite realized, until Orual had come, how strange she had begun to feel in her palace, with its invisible servants and alien finery and husband who came to her only in the dark.

 

At first the days were wonders (not to speak of the nights; for the moment Psyche had averted her thoughts from those). The palace – mammoth in size, labyrinthine, with corridors that branched out a thousand different ways and twisting stairs ascending to endless turrets – filled her days as she sought out its mysteries, room after room.  There were great halls and galleries crowded with magnificent paintings and tapestries, the likes of which she had never before seen or, indeed, imagined – full of scenes that she supposed must depict far, foreign regions of the world, and others that she supposed, with a tremble, must depict a holy world she could never hope to visit fully except through death.  Yet the latter seemed to pulse with a brightness that was almost hard to look at at times, and the strangeness of them could almost disturb her, especially when she felt how insufficient she herself was for the world they depicted.  At first she visited them often, wrapping herself in their beauty and pushing away her faint feelings of unease at the most sacred of them; later she visited less often, without ever defining a reason to herself.

 

The library felt more homely to her, even as its spectacle enthralled her, with its thousands upon thousands – perhaps endless – ranks of books.  Here, again, she had proof that she was in a palace not made by mortals, because she knew the books here were no part of the mortal world.  There were books that she recognized, from the Fox’s teaching, as great works of Greek literature – but then, as in the paintings, there were books that drew for her countries and worlds far beyond her ken or reach.  And, indeed, though some of these works were likewise in Greek, others were written in the barbarian language of Glome, and Psyche doubted whether there were as many as five books that had ever truly been written in the language of her birth country.  Still, she felt more comfort in the library than in the galleries, and she spent many hours there, lost in the books.

 

As time wore on, in fact, she began to spend much more time in the library than in exploring the palace, because despite its size, she had found that the palace offered less that was of interest to her than one might have expected – and increasingly, she began to find places that frightened her a little.  There were rooms and rooms of diversions, but few of them seemed… commonplace.  _And why should you wish for commonplace things?_ she asked herself – but there it was.  There was a room with a chess table, its pieces all arranged, which, when you began to play, played as your opponent – but there was no one to play it.  Psyche had spoken to it as a companion, tried to find someone on the other side of the game by touch, and had found nothing.  As a child she had wished for magic, but in reality (and was this reality?), she found she had to repress a shudder.  She had made herself finish that first game (she had lost) but had never gone back.  There were other rooms like that -- rooms where music of supernal beauty played with no one and no instruments to play it, and a strange room full of tapestries depicting scenes which, if you studied them for a moment, came to life and began to show wondrous stories. Still, wondrous or not, most of the tapestries told tales of human lives, which had its own appeal in this palace where precious few things felt human. So at times Psyche felt drawn to this, to the human world it showed, and she set her amazement aside and became absorbed in the stories; but at other times, she felt it to be too strange for comfort, and avoided it as well.

 

She had asked her husband once, as they lay in the darkness, how such things could be, and his voice, though always regal, seemed even more so to her then as he answered: “It is so because I wish it.”  To Psyche, this seemed all the answer that could ever be needed, and no answer at all.

 

Her husband: her thoughts had come to him at last.

 

At first she truly believed she could ask nothing more of life than to be married to this god, in this place, and to find him with her in the night’s holy darkness.  She knew him to be beautiful, knew it by touch, and knew what pleasure he found in her, and she in him.  At first she had felt such shame – well, at first? Out here in the cold and damp of mortals, Psyche wasn’t altogether sure it had ever left her – but she had trusted to the gods and their designs for her. And soon she found that it was her husband’s touch that drew her out of herself and defined her new world for her.  When they lay together, she could almost believe that she belonged in this world of strange divinity. Indeed, in the peak moments of their communion, she came near to believing she was divine herself.

 

Yet never quite.

 

She and her husband  did speak, sometimes, mostly after love.  And in the beginning, at least, she had felt no doubts; no doubt as to her love for him, of his love for her, of the joy that her new life bore her. Her husband was passionate but tender, loving, protective – and through it all, she knew his glory.  It was in his every word, his every touch.  When he spoke his words rang with certainty – no, more; what she knew to be omniscience – and at the start Psyche thrilled to it.  He always knew what was right, for her and for all else.  Still, nearly every night he asked her, so gently, if her new home suited her and if she had everything she wanted. Psyche loved his asking, and yet for quite some time, whenever he spoke his grandeur and majesty seemed to break over her anew, and so she found it hard to speak to him of her own feelings and desires.  “My simple Psyche,” he called her fondly, and instantly she seemed so to herself.  What more could a simple creature want than the expansive pleasures the palace and her husband provided?

 

It took a long time for Psyche to realize the full depth of her loneliness, and a still longer time to speak to her husband of it.

 

For all the palace provided, it provided no human companionship – in fact, very little companionship at all.  The force that played the lute and moved the chess pieces was just that, no more than a force.  The servants did little more than serve; they would answer some of her questions, but not many.  If she asked them about the dishes they served or the rooms they kept, they would answer immediately – but if she asked them who they were, they responded simply, “We are here to serve you.”  If she asked how they came to be in this palace, or what they knew of the god of the mountain or of the Shadowbrute, their answer were always the same:

 

“I am forbidden to tell.”

 

“But _who_ has forbidden you?” Psyche asked once in exasperation.

 

“I am forbidden to tell.”

 

And that, it seemed, was that.

 

After that, Psyche began spending more time outside the palace during the days.  And though, when she told her husband of it, she had an intuitive sense that he disapproved, he never spoke of it, and so she continued to do it (if this was the first act of defiance of her husband that she had ever made, she refused to acknowledge it).  He had told her in their first night together that she might not leave the valley, and, though it was small, of course she never disobeyed -- though she spent more time than was sensible staring across the river, looking out at a world in which she had no part anymore.  After some time she knew every stone, every tree, every blade of grass in the valley, so that she began to wonder why she went out so often.  When she found the answer, after much searching of thoughts and desires she had deliberately hidden from herself, she was horrified: she knew there were men on the mountain, and although she knew their kind, she had hoped she should meet them.  Thieves, outlaws, vagabonds – men from whom she had to fear injury, rape, or worse – and yet she wished to meet them!  The knowledge of how fiercely she desired human companionship filled her with abhorrence.  Yet she knew it to be so deep-seated and powerful that there was no way to cure it but to give in.

 

And so that night she spoke to her husband of it, though she framed it more narrowly and told him simply of her craving to see Orual.  Although she wished keenly to see others she loved as well, she never asked if she might see the Fox, or Bardia, or her old nurse, or anyone else; Orual was the only one in whose veins divine blood flowed.  Once she had asked the favor of him, there was a long silence, during which Psyche quailed – had she gone too far?  Asked for too much?  She slumped back onto the mattress in relief when she heard his answer:

 

“Very well.  I shall arrange it.”

 

Psyche’s babbled thank-yous were nearly incomprehensible, falling over one another.

 

“But,” he said after a long moment, “it shall not all be as you wish.”

 

“What do you mean?” Psyche asked quickly, and then hoped she had not been discourteous.

 

“You will find out in time,” her husband told her.  “It can be no other way.”

 

That veiled caution, which seemed to raise more questions than it answered, was all the warning Psyche had of the terrible divide her meeting with Orual would drive between them.

 

Yet the strangest part of it all was that in the days after Orual’s first visit, their conversation seemed to ring through Psyche’s head constantly, and increasingly, what bothered her most was not the awful ending of the visit.  It seemed that Orual’s visit had torn a veil away from Psyche’s eyes and allowed her to see, for the first time, how strange her situation was and how uncomfortable her place in it was.  Psyche had never truly felt how little she knew of her husband until Orual’s questions had found her without answers.

 

For example, that evening she had asked him his name.

 

There was a pause.  “You know I may not tell you that,” he said eventually.

 

Psyche thought of Orual’s visit, of her face and her disbelieving questions, and somehow it gave her strength to answer: “Why can’t you tell me?  Who has forbidden you?”

 

His voice carried a trace of impatience as he answered, “I may not tell you that either.”

 

“You sound like the servants,” Psyche blurted, and then nearly bit her tongue off in horror.

 

But when he responded, there was no anger in his voice, only a slight weariness.  “In some ways, I am little more than a servant,” he replied.

 

Psyche couldn’t make any sense of this at all, but she didn’t know how to ask.  Instead, she returned to her original question: “I know I can’t see you. I know that you are… that it’s forbidden.  But… please.  Give me a name I can call you.  I…”  She didn’t know how to say all that she meant, and so fell back on the same phrase: “Please give me a name I can call you.”

 

There was a long pause.  In it Psyche wondered: what possible reason could there be for keeping his name from her?  Was it because he was to be the only person – the only _being_ – in her world?  Why should she need a name for him if there was no one else she might speak to?  Psyche shrank from the thought.

 

Finally, he spoke.  “You may call me Orotheos,” he told her.

 

“Orotheos.”  She said the word slowly, reflecting.  “That’s Greek – for ‘mountain god’.  ‘God of the mountain.’”

 

“Yes.”

 

“But…” Psyche didn’t know why this bothered her so, but she found herself protesting without having thought it through. “Haven’t you a more personal name?  I already know you for god of the mountain.  Is there nothing else…”  Nothing else -- what? Nothing else she could call him, or nothing else she could know of him?

 

“I have given you a name you may call me, as you asked,” he replied, his voice cold now.  “Do not presume too much.”

 

So Psyche called him Orotheos.  But in her mind, his name was still a blank.  She realized she hadn’t been asking for a name so much as a sense of his identity, of who he was – and he wouldn’t give that.

 

In the days following, she had felt stranger and stranger around him.  Before, she had begun to believe herself almost divine; now, after Orual’s visit, she felt that all of this had been purest delusion.  Of course she was human.  How could she be anything else?  Suddenly, she heard her own words in her mind, words she had spoken to Orual before she had gone to be sacrificed:

 

_You think it devours the offering.  I mostly think so myself.  Anyway, it means death.  Orual, you didn’t think I was such a child as not to know that?  How can I be the ransom for all Glome unless I die?  And if I am to go to the god, of course it must be through death.  That way, even what is strangest in the holy sayings might be true.  To be eaten and to be married to the god might not be so different.  We don’t understand._

 

And one sentence echoed in her mind again and again:

 

_If I am to go to the god, of course it must be through death._

But it hadn’t been through death.

 

Why hadn’t it been?

 

Why had she been brought to this place, this divine place, in her full, shaming mortality?  How could she be with the god of the Mountain while she still lived, lived in human flesh?  And if she had died, might she see her husband in light as well as feeling him in dark?

 

And if he had brought her here alive, alive and mortal, mustn’t he accept her so and allow her to live with him more fully?  As she sat on the riverbank, shivering constantly, running through the events of her time here in her mind, she became aware of a sense of betrayal, something she’d never dreamed she’d feel for the husband she loved so dearly.  Why should he bring her here and then refuse to live with her?  Why did he keep his purpose hidden from her – refusing to tell her why he must come to her only in darkness, refusing to tell her that Orual would not see the palace, refusing even to tell her his name?  He called her “simple Psyche” – was that all that she was to him, a simple creature who could never be trusted with complex realities?  And perhaps he wanted her that way, wanted a simple creature who would adore him in a simple way, whose warm body could always be enjoyed and who would never ask for more of him than he was willing to give.  But was that what she wanted?  And -- did he care what she wanted at all?

 

But then, when had anyone cared what she wanted?   In the time since she had reached full womanhood – even, in fact, before then – any number of “choices” had forced themselves upon her, choices which were no choice at all. Each time she had been forced into a path over which she had no choice.  And each time she had tried to reclaim those choices, tried to wear her fetters as gracefully as possible.  When the people would have rioted had she not gone out to touch them in their fever, she spoke out to say that they were her people and she chose to minister to them.  When she had been sacrificed, she had filled her mind with fantasies of the god of the Grey Mountain, trying (none too successfully) to ignore her terror of abandonment and slow death chained to the tree – trying to choose to move forward into the horror.  And when West-Wind had brought her to her new palace, when her husband told her what her life would be like and who she would be from now on… well, she’d fallen in with it.  It wasn’t hard to do, living from moment to moment, refusing to think of the world she’d left.

 

And now she couldn’t stop thinking of it. 

 

In her argument with Orual over the plan of the lamp – the plan which Orual still waited across the river for Psyche to carry out -- Psyche had been quick to anger with everything Orual said, and quick to blame.  And, indeed, threats of murder and suicide – what had happened to Orual in these last few months?  What poison had seeped  into her mind, what corruption had taken possession of her soul to make those threats possible?   In those moments Orual’s love was, indeed, like looking into a pit – something foul, its filth alive with stunted, reeking plant life and vermin -- and yet something that invited you to be part of it, to leap hand in hand with its creator and stay forever in the dark, where heat from below the earth warmed you and the blackness hid from you the eager greed in the eyes of your companion.

 

Like the blackness of her palace at night.

 

Ridiculous, of course.  Her husband’s love for her was nothing like Orual’s.  Nothing!  She knew him better than that… she knew him…

 

_Not at all._

 

When Orual had first come to her with her insane request, Psyche’s path had seemed clear almost immediately.  Orual could not see the palace, could not tell exactly where it was.  After her husband had fallen asleep, Psyche could merely take her lantern outside and a short distance away, light the lamp, and then tell Orual that her husband was indeed a god who took human form.  The promise she had given Orual, after all, meant no more than the promise she had given her husband.  And for the first time, she would be able to choose her path for herself, choose which promise to honor, choose what mattered to her.  Her choice would be the strange, inhuman ecstasies of her marriage and the alien wonders of her half-divine life, a life as the bride of a god.

 

She glanced over at the lantern, cold and unlit, a few feet away.

 

 _Of course,_ she told herself fiercely, _of course that is my choice._   How could it be otherwise?  As she had told Orual before she was sacrificed, the life she had left was indeed not much to lose.  To be married to some faraway king, to be taken forever from Orual and the Fox and everything else she had known all her life – _and to be married to a mortal king_ , she told herself, and, after all, there was part of her that shrank from that thought.  In that moment she knew she wished to stay with the god, strange as her life might be.  But then again, how strange it all was, and how alien she herself felt amid all of it…

 

Wasn’t there any other way it could be?

 

She was human and her husband divine.  There was never any chance of equality between them.  And, after all, it wasn’t equality she sought.  But she wanted… if she was married to him, then why might she not be his wife?   For, whatever might be between a husband and wife, she knew that all of this mystery was not part of any human marriage…

 

_Why should you want a human marriage?  You know you don’t._

Then the truth came to her, hot as a branding iron: This mystery was not a part of any marriage that _she_ wanted to be a part of.

 

She shrank from it, tried to un-think it, but here in this cold moment where she knew herself to be so thoroughly mortal, the thought refused to die.  This marriage wasn’t what she wanted.  This darkness, this alien-ness – and this feeling that she mattered not at all, that any kindness or love she was shown was merely at a god’s whim, and thus could be taken from her at any time without any regard for her at all.  Why should he regard her at all, except by whim?  His true life would always be in the divine world.  How should she be anything more than a plaything to him?

 

Her jaw set in a hard line, her innate stubbornness finally, after all these days, coming to the fore.  She would not accept this any longer.  If she was to be married to a god, then let him be married to her as well.

 

If she were to light the lamp, if she were to see him in the night, it would not be for any doubt that he was a god in human shape (human shape while he was with her, at least), beautiful beyond all bearing.  It would be her choice to demand a life that she could live without this emptiness and longing at its core.  If he loved her, let him desire her happiness as well as his own.  His reasons for forbidding her to see him were divine, not human – and yet, if her life were to be built around him, was an explanation really so much to expect?  Didn’t she deserve understanding of her husband, and knowledge of the reasons for his treatment of her?

 

She would no longer ask to see him in the light -- she had asked before and he had always refused her, at first in an understanding tone, and then later with some impatience.  Rather than asking passively, she would take control: she would turn the light on him and force him to accept that she was not a mindless plaything, not his “simple Psyche”.  For once she would not bow to others’ attempts to force her into a life and death of their design.  For once, she would make her own choice.

 

She lifted the lamp from the ground and made sure that there was oil in the urn.  She would go and meet her husband face to face. 


End file.
